Is British English a historical and cultural monument, or can it – indeed should it – still serve as a model for international use?

The Director of the BBC Pronunciation Unit follows our recent articles on RP and the Queen's English with a review of how his corporation has approached such thorny issues over the six decades of its existence

Do both the public and the scholarly uses of the phrases ‘native language’ and ‘native speaker’ need to be revised or even superseded?

Following recent articles on language awareness, we provide here an opportunity to listen in on the debate in Japan regarding language, culture and the outside world

A wide range of newsletters, clippings and cuttings, catalogues and correspondence arrives (and is welcomed) on ET's editorial desk. From the mass that goes into our files comes this mix of quirky humour, special usages, neologisms and nonce words.

English has had centuries of ‘traditional orthography’, but novel varieties of English have no orthography at all until it is created for them. How are these spelling systems developed and how close to, or distant from, ‘real’ spelling need they be?

If lexical abbreviation is no more than a fringe to vocabulary proper, it is a most diverse and dynamic fringe

Although ET is not a literary magazine, poetry and other genres of literature can nonetheless be grist to our linguistic mill. Canadian poet JUDITH COWAN here brings both the linguistic and the poetic together, to highlight in the free flow of her verse a style of speech now widely heard in North America today.

Thesauruses, or if you are more classically inclined thesauri, appear to be in vogue. In ET12 (Oct 87), we reviewed the latest Longman revision of Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases, which the company had first published in 1852. Then, in ET14 (Apr 88) we drew attention to the rather surprising facsimile reproduction by Bloomsbury of the original 1852 Roget. Now, it is both relevant and important to highlight some developments on the part of a third British publisher, Collins, who have brought out not one but two new wordbooks:

• The COLLINS School Thesaurus, ISBN 0-00-313318-4, £5.95: This is actually an Australian work, first published by Jacaranda Press in 1986 under the copyright of Macquarie University, New South Wales, and edited by Linsay Knight. The blurb claims ‘over 940 word groups, each consisting of words and phrases with closely related meanings’. The keyword in each group is explained, after which its associate words take their turn, as shown in the group for the verb fall reproduced below. The school thesaurus is a concise and powerful tool, lucidly organized and complemented by an easy-to-use index.

• The COLLINS Dictionary and Thesaurus in One Volume, 0-00-433186-9, £11.95; Collins already had a concise version of their standard dictionary of English, and a companion thesaurus. The trick here has been to combine them, so that the thesaurus section runs along the bottom of each page, in time with the alphabetic columns. The blurb says: ‘Here for the first time in one handy volume the reader is offered a general-purpose Dictionary and a Thesaurus in dictionary form’. And the blurb is right, as far as we know. Collins claim 71,000 dictionary references and 250,000 thesaurus ‘synonyms’. We already have on our shelves the volumes before they were unified, and have concluded that the unification is to be preferred. (See sample page.)